


the wind always at your back

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-23
Updated: 2012-06-23
Packaged: 2017-11-08 09:24:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam loses Dean; Sam never loses Dean. Sam lets go; Sam hangs on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wind always at your back

**Author's Note:**

> I chose not to use archive warnings this time because there is something like character death, but it's an ambiguous in-between situation. Still, beware if that's something you'd rather avoid.
> 
> Written for spnspringfling over on LJ, for tebtosca, from the prompt "a breath of fresh air."

i.

Sam wakes to familiar, pounding panic. The air of the cabin is still. He crashes out the door, slumps to the steps in relief. Still there.

The spinning swirl of dry leaves at the edge of the clearing pauses a moment, then scuffs towards him. Warm damp air breathes over Sam’s face, friendly like a huge dog, except it smells of nothing but a trace of dirt. Dean settles in a gusty sigh, scattering pine needles across Sam’s shoulders. He stirs through Sam’s hair, then withdraws. But Sam can sense the steady rhythm next to him now, attentive, there, breathing.

 

ii.

“He is not a ghost,” Cas had said.

To be honest, Sam had been having a hard time paying attention. Soul stuff, what purgatory’s made of, spirit caught in a matrix, what the fuck ever. Dean. He’s failed again, lost Dean. He’s let Dean slip through his fingers like air. Ironic. A hundred odd times he’d seen Dean’s chest go still, felt at his lips for the faintest stir. A hundred odd times he’d woken up to Asia, remembering a deadweight of loss, meat and bone. Now all he has of Dean is a breath.

Sometimes that thought chokes him. 

 

iii.

In Sam’s dreams Dean is solid, warm, fleshed out. 

“You OK?” he’d asked the first night, and, yeah, that could be wish fulfillment, or it could be Dean. Dean _would_ ask, first thing after returning from the otherworld stripped down to a sentient mini tornado, he would ask if Sam was OK.

The answer’s yes. As long as he can feel Dean’s weight on him, taste Dean’s mouth when they kiss. As long as he’s got the catch of calluses when Dean palms his dick, the catch of Dean’s breath when Sam pushes in.

He breathes Dean when he comes.

 

iv.

He consults Castiel.

Cas is watching ants at the edge of the clearing. Two neat files, one marching away, one marching back. Dean’s an agitation in the branches.

“Ingenious,” Cas says.

Sam’s not sure if he means the anthill or the dream incest soul sex. Though Sam had left out that part.

“Is it, I mean, could he,” Sam says. He’s not sure what he’s asking. Whether Dean could move into him, maybe, whether Dean would be there alive if Sam slept forever, inhaling and exhaling. Holding Dean in his lungs.

“Gross, dude,” says the Dean Sam dreams that night.

v.

At first Dean had panicked, spun out of control, spun off. Sam had been terrified to reach out to him. He might disrupt whatever holds Dean together. He’d curved his hands round empty space instead, the way Jess had shaped clay, the year she did pottery. Dean had calmed to a humming funnel, spinning over Sam’s heart like a top.

These days it’s more like Dean’s bored, restless. He ranges the clearing, shuffles papers indoors, flips through Rufus’s dated porn stash. “Good to see you’re still crude as ever,” Sam says, and Dean blows potato chip crumbs in his face.

 

vi.

“I say we blow this joint,” Dean says. “C’mon, Sammy. Enough with the rustic vacation.”

Sam is dreaming. Dean tickles across his chest, a fingering breeze. 

“I’m not hunting monsters with my trusty disembodied whirlwind sidekick,” says Sam. 

“Roadtrip with your brother,” Dean counters. “You know you want to.”

Sam hasn’t asked Cas again whether the dreams are real. Even if it’s all in his head, yeah, he wants that, wants to let Dean catch a Grand Canyon sunset in a swirl of red dust. About time.

“OK,” he says. 

In the car Dean is an exhalation of sun-warmed leather.

 

vii.

When Sam dreams now it’s different. He’s let it go bit by bit, the tiny, wiry hairs on the backs of Dean’s fingers, the salt of Dean down his throat. He’s not pulling Dean down anymore, not drawing him in. He breathes out instead, lets his chest go still under the cheap polyester sheet and the pilled motel blanket. He thinks this is how it ends. Just the road, and the road’s not a road. It’s a shape in the wind, a rush of darkness, it’s them, it’s Dean laughing. Fuck heaven, hell, purgatory. No more doors, no more cages.


End file.
